The SMCC Beacon—Fall 2021
The Magazine
This is a compilation of articles published during the Fall 2021 semester in the SMCC Beacon, Southern Maine Community College's student newspaper. I was responsible for designing this edition. The masthead is a modified version of a logo by Clayton Hoyle (I changed the text to white and the lighthouse from grey to blue).
Some of my major breaks from former editions included:
- Typeface is now Trajan for titles and Futura for body text (reflecting the move to digital)
- Pull quotes are now highlighted in context with heavier text weight and colored blue
- A bauble from Adobe Caslon's glyphs was added to indicate the end of each article
The choice of cover photograph is not coincidental. The last volume, in 2020, showed the campus's coast in the dead of winter on the cover. Although it left much to be desired, 2021 was undeniably a new dawn for both SMCC and the world after the brutal early phases of the COVID pandemic.
This spread was designed to stand out. Slicing the left page in half with an image on one side and a block of blue on the other was a tactic meant to help accommodate the oddly-sized image while keeping the headline from blending into it. This also gave me room to insert the lede, allowing the article to neatly fit the spread. Sadly, there were some remnant image quality issues that went unresolved.
This was the first spread designed for the edition, and it was originally just meant as an exercise to layout this one article. The pull quotes are highlighted enough to pull the eye but not enough to disrupt the design as a whole.
2023 Reflections
A lot has changed since I laid out this issue. This was the first time I'd ever been trusted with making layouts for an organization, and my first experience trying multi-page design and laying out other people's copy and photographs. I remember sitting in the News Writing and Production class as my professor showed my classmates the layout over ZOOM. When we got to one of their articles, my classmate exclaimed that it was surreal to see their writing in print, that it 'made it feel real.' My standards have only risen for my craftsmanship, but my standards for client approval will probably forever be based on that: does it make it feel real? Does it make them smile? Does it get them excited and make them feel like anything is possible?
I'm incredibly fortunate due to the efforts of my extraordinary professor Rachel Guthrie at SMCC to have been able to continue making issues of the Beacon throughout two more semesters. I invite you to explore my personal journey through design by comparing this issue with the two more expansive ones that followed it, all of which are provided here in my portfolio.
